`Fringe Dwellers` Gets Inside Australian Social Problems

February 13, 1987|By Dave Kehr, Movie critic.

Australian filmmaker Bruce Beresford, lately the director of such big-budget Hollywood productions as ``King David`` and ``Crimes of the Heart,``

returned to his native country to make ``The Fringe Dwellers,`` a modest independent production. It`s clearly a labor of love--or at least, of a stricken social conscience--and while it`s far from free of sentimental maneuverings, it`s Beresford`s most authentic-feeling work in quite some time. The ``Fringe Dwellers`` of the title are a group of aborigines who live in a tin hut settlement on the outskirts of a small, forlorn town in Queensland--which bills itself as ``The Beef Capital of the Burnett.`` It`s exactly the sort of setting that sent Beresford into nostalgic raptures in his 1983 film ``Tender Mercies,`` though here he portrays the pastoral community as an enclave of narrow-mindedness and racial oppression.

The black residents are restricted to their own district, with their own run-down bar and soda fountain. Though the schools are integrated, the black children are ostracized and very few stay in the system until graduation.

Into this hostile atmosphere strides Trilby (Kristina Nehm), a teenage child of the black shantytown determined to better herself and her family. She convinces her father, Joe (Bob Maza), to apply for subsidized housing in a newly built subdivision. Although her father is reluctant to hold down a steady job, she`s sure that with the money they receive from the government, plus her elder sister`s earnings as a nurse, they`ll be able to make ends meet.

Much of ``The Fringe Dwellers`` seems familiar from the American ``social problem`` movies of 30 or 40 years ago. There are the same overstated oppositions (a rather clumsy camera movement that compares the luxury of the local white bar with the decrepitude of the black establishment that faces it across the street), the same ringing speeches (``We`re all Australians, aren`t we?`` declares Trilby) and the same suspicious emphasis placed on the injustices dealt to extraordinary individuals (Trilby must be beautiful, sensitive and highly intelligent), as if injustices dealt to average beings didn`t matter quite so much.

But if Beresford often seems addicted to melodramatic extremes, he also has the grace to allow a certain ambivalence in Trilby`s character to emerge. With her desperate dreams of middle-class respectability, Trilby becomes a sort of black Alice Adams, horribly embarrassed to discover that her mother, invited to tea by the white lady next door, has not only eaten all the scones set before her, but walked off with her napkin as well. Indeed, Trilby often seems driven by a sense of snobbishness as much as by her fierce natural pride, and this hint of vanity in her character saves it from the curse of plaster sainthood.

Beresford`s approach to the medium is essentially theatrical: He likes to gather a number of actors in a restricted area and film them in extended takes from a low angle that suggests the vantage point of a spectator looking up at a stage. Though this approach can be deadly in a film, like ``King David,``

that requires a visual sweep, it suits the circumstances here, allowing the talented cast to develop their characterizations in their own time and space. As Trilby, Kristina Nehm has a compelling, sullen charm. As her mother, Justine Saunders creates a childlike, unreflective woman sunk into the torpor of poverty who, near the end, suddenly blossoms forth in a breathtaking lyrical passage--a monologue that describes her memories of a nomadic childhood.

Beresford has the good sense to trust his actors; it`s a pity, then, that he doesn`t trust his material. Rather than allow the plot to develop with the same natural rhythm as the performances, he forces it through an extravagant number of unnecessary twists, including unwanted pregnancy, a fateful card game, an eviction, a mysterious disappearance and an infanticide. This kind of excess doesn`t serve to make the issues more pressing; it serves only to remind us that we`re watching a movie, which makes the issues seem more trivial.

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Receiving a last-minute opening in Chicago this week (at the Three Penny and Wilmette Theaters) is Josh Waletzky`s ``Partisans of Vilna,`` a documentary on Jewish resistance against the Nazis during World War II.

Unlike the other Holocaust documentaries that have appeared these last few years, ``Partisans of Vilna`` is meant less as a mourning of the dead than a celebration of action and heroism. The film focuses on the Vilna ghetto, where an underground resistance movement was organized in 1941. The Jewish partisans carried out raids against the Nazis, both in the city and in the surrounding woods, while working for the formation of similar groups in the other ghettos of occupied Europe.

It`s a stirring tale, though it is dryly told. Rather than build on the formal innovation of Claude Lanzmann`s ``Shoah,`` Waletzky resorts to the usual assemblage of newsreel footage, contemporary interviews and abstract graphics. It seems necessary today to find an alternative to this standard format, which has been drained of its impact by constant use (and abuse) on television.

``THE FRINGE DWELLERS``

(STAR)(STAR)

Directed by Bruce Beresford; written by Bruce Beresford and Rhoisin Beresford, from the novel by Nene Gare; photographed by Don McAlpine; edited by Tim Wellburn; music by George Dreyfus; production designed by Herbert Pinter; produced by Sue Milliken. Running time, 1:38. An Atlantic release;